The House of American Women

"Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light In here? Say, who owns this house? It's not mine. I dreamed another, sweeter, brighter
With a view of lakes crossed in painted boats; Of fields wide as arms open for me. This house is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”
— Toni Morrison, Home

In her novel Home, Toni Morrison asks, 'Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light?' Her words resonate, an enduring echo in a dark world, a nation, a house, where women’s agency is continually negotiable. A House of Mirrors—not a home—where the truth is hidden beneath polite niceties and silence agreements.
On November 5th, 2024, as America watched the election results unfold, I was on a date. I’d been to the same pub eight years to the day for the 2016 election, though the energy in 2024 was vastly different. By 2024, Donald Trump, running for president, had lost any trace of levity.
Before I left for my date, I’d let my friends and family know where I would be, promising updates and assuaging probing questions. The man I was meeting was ‘nice.’ Obviously, that’s why I’d agreed to meet with him. No, I didn’t know his last name, I’d told my mom. He’s cool, he’s nice. I know the bartender, etcetera, etcetera. I brushed off my mother’s worry despite quietly sharing the same vigilance. I’ve been a woman in the world for thirty-two years. I’ve experienced how high the stakes can quickly become amidst something innocuous. Anyone can be ‘nice.’ That doesn’t make them good.
Nice. The same way you might bring a ‘nice’ man home, his hands wrapped around your hips from behind. Say there is a mirror before you, and you notice for the first time that his reflection doesn’t appear. You see only yourself as a tragic impending doom sets in, realizing you’re with a vampire. He’s at your house, he’s in your home. You might smile to be agreeable, praying not to set off alarms to the monster you’d invited in.
Being 'nice' is a disarming façade, a hollow assurance obscuring what may lurk beneath its surface. Safety for women hinges on vigilance and unspoken survival strategies. A man being 'nice' and a woman reflecting this back to placate him becomes both a fragile comfort and a tool of systemic complacency. The unnerving truth lurks below: trust, once given, can make a woman complicit in her own defenselessness.
In 2016, I’d watched Trump win the presidential election against Hillary Clinton in a noisy, lively pub. I heard a woman's shrill, sinister cry when it was announced. The weeping song of the canary in the coal mine, crying out against the toxic fumes before death.
Donald J. Trump, American President. “The Donald,” the NBC network’s former biggest star on The Apprentice—now the voice of the American people. A voice we all listened to in a 2005 hot mic during his NBC tenure, bragging to eight fellow men on a bus. Power-crazed, Trump cheerily described how easy and entertaining it was to sexually dominate women in simple interactions they wouldn’t expect. The example he used was furniture shopping. The men laughed. He was kidding. It was funny—or, if not funny, he didn’t mean it. But in 2024, with 26 sexual assault allegations and criminal liability for the dressing room rape of E. Jean Caroll, the justifications had dried up. They weren’t needed anymore.
In 2024, Trump’s second election night, I was enjoying my date as a charming distraction to what felt like outright impending doom. Best to drink my sorrows with a handsome stranger. We chatted as dates do before I excused myself to the restroom. Though I hate chugging a beer, I instinctively threw back the quarter left of my pilsner before I went. As I stood, the bartender asked if we wanted another, and we agreed. I then spent my walk to the bathroom cursing myself. I had utterly defeated the purpose of finishing my beer in the first place. For my entire restroom trip, I debated whether I should drink the new beer to be polite and nice. Switching out my fresh beer might dampen the date.
As in-vogue as being a public piece of shit has become, some may still be offended at being associated with that ilk.
I was weighing social discomfort against my safety. A weighty calculus women are forced to make near constant. Our survival depends on navigating implicit rules in a house ─ the American home, where we’ve learned to adhere to social niceties above our safety.
When I sat back down, my still-empty pint glass sat beside his newly filled one. The bartender came and retook my order. Gratefully, I told her again. The bartender’s act felt intentional, as though the woman knew to wait to pour my drink. I chalked it up to the hushed oath, the wordless covenant that dwells between women to keep each other safe. We silently cooperate within the House of Mirrors (where vampires skirt under the cloak of amiability), wherein our ever-shaky right to live freely exists– even in simpler moments.
When I was nine, my dad and stepmother left me in his house with a babysitter. He was a neighborhood kid up the street. He was sixteen. He was nice. I had a bit of a crush on him, so I wore my favorite blue satin pajamas to ensure I looked cute. But that night, while my babysitter’s clammy hands unbuttoned my pajamas, I first learned that anyone can be nice. This doesn’t make them good. The following day, I tucked my favorite blue satin pajamas out of view in my closet, where I never retrieved them.
In the days that followed, I sought understanding from my mom, unknowingly offsetting a lucidity from which I would never recover. I remember saying, “I think something bad happened.” She sat in a quiet, shattered seethe. I felt her sadness for me as she told me everything was okay and took her silent retreat to her room. Unbeknownst to me, she was being quietly confronted twofold: my loss of innocence and the dying canary’s echo that signaled her own loss decades prior. A secret she’d kept after the fact, walking home from trick-or-treating, past her angry mother who scolded her for being late. A secret I didn’t learn for many years after my confession. I waited as she collected herself before she dropped me off for school. Though she got me a counselor who I never learned to trust, I don’t recall any more conversations with her about it.
Later that day, my dad confronted me. His voice was thick and angry. He stood over me, face red as he screamed, asking what happened. I was terrified. I felt disgusted and embarrassed. I was in trouble. I said nothing happened. He just put his hand on my knee. I daggered myself, filleting my credibility to appease him. I said I’d lied, or actually, my mom just misunderstood. This released me from my father’s emotional wrath. I returned to the playground as I inherited a new sensation. An inheritance that informed my silence the next time a man hurt me and the time after that: shame. It would have been easier if it hadn’t happened. Taking cues, I pretended it didn’t. Days later, in whispers, my stepmother asked, "Did it really happen?” I was shocked she might care. I nodded silently, carefully observing her, hoping an adult would tell me it was okay, that I was okay. She shook her head, chastising me. “He just has big hands.”
After that, I became more lucid in our home, the House of Mirrors.
The man with big hands attended my birthday party in our backyard. He gave me a jewelry box with a small mirror inside. My stepmother insisted I keep it on my dresser for years on, where it sat still and untouched, a relic to my disgrace. Shortly after we moved off the street, my family and I ran into him on the beach. I stood uncomfortably bare, pulling at my swimsuit as my stepmom and he spoke above me. She told him I would love to have him babysit me again. I nodded along. I smiled to be nice. Come back to my house, I withered, rob me what’s left of the home. He smiled back at the silence.
Not too long after my stepmom morphed my assault into a mental weapon, she pulled me outside after school. She sat me down in the backyard ─ while my stepsiblings ate after-school snacks and played video games ─ to confess her sexual assault. Vodka was there, too, I’m sure. She’d said, “Like what happened to you.” She shared that she had come home with a ripped dress and tried to climb the stairs before her mother could see. There were no other details. I listened quietly. I could see the pattern of silence even then. I wondered if she also had folded her dress, tucking it away in silent disgrace at the back of her closet where my satin pajamas still lived.
In hushed tones, she said, “Me too.” If only for a moment. She was seeking shelter from whatever demon beckoned her, knocking expectantly outside the female covenant she had forced me into years before. Her abuse had always come from her inability to keep a secure self-concept in a world that routinely tried to mar it. She generally aligned herself with oppressive attitudes around women, morphing her suffering into a dominating tool to needle me. But sometimes, like that day, the House of Mirrors reflected that she was, in fact, just a woman, too. To some degree, I understood, for I would never dare to open that odious jewelry box and see myself reflected in its small mirror.
My father and his wife are Trump supporters. In the earlier days of Trump, when I still had the gumption to try and change people’s minds, I tried to level with my dad. I’d always found him to be intelligent, historically informed, and a man who loved women (his mom, his many sisters, and, more importantly, me). I pointed to the over 26 women who came forward with sexual assault allegations. My dad didn’t think there was a reason to believe them. He said this to me, his daughter, whom he chose not to believe those years prior. His daughter, whom he’d call after the arrest of the babysitter (for crimes against many more children) years on seeking redemption. “I’ll kill him,” he’d said too late. As we argued about Trump, I cried to him, heated and sore. In subtle implications, I’d carefully skirted around how the dismissal of these women was his dismissal of me at nine, all over again. But my emotionally agitated display only proved my irrationality further. The side he chose remained. It wasn’t mine.
My father is an example of many men I’ve had conversations with around Trump’s history of abuse. There’s an unsettling ease in how they flick away his abuses and spit on the women who illuminate them. They seem to flagrantly miss the point ─ do they not see? No ─ it’s locker room talk. It’s just a joke. It’s a lie told by women who want attention. This is what they say in the place of “it doesn’t matter.” To reason it away, not say the quiet part aloud, and be nice. Sure, sexual assault is bad ─ but not unforgivable.
The message is clear: boys will be boys, and women will be quiet.
I hadn’t been prepared to see such seismic mirroring of (my own and many women’s) demonized victimhood when Trump tapped Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. American women watched on as Christine Blasey Ford arduously testified against Kavanaugh for sexually assaulting her in the early 1980s. She stayed composed as she recounted a high school party she and Kavanaugh attended. She narrated how he’d pinned her to a bed and pushed his hand over her mouth while he forcefully tried to undress her. She said she couldn’t breathe, that she was afraid he would rape her, or that the prolonged lack of oxygen would kill her. The American nation watched on, wagging its finger. She was entertainment and then fodder, mocked and terrorized ─ despised. Her story was inconvenient, inessential, and menacing. People reasoned that this independently successful professor and researcher was trying to ruin Kavanaugh’s life, perhaps for fame or money. Meanwhile, under threat of death, she and her family were forced to hide out in hotels with 24-hour security, security that she still requires to this day.
In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Christine Blasey Ford said after the night Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her, she left feeling it was a success: “…My escape was successful. And most importantly, I got past my parents without them knowing.” When asked what she was afraid of had her parents found out, she reflected on her value scale of social cost versus safety, “...I’d be reprimanded for putting myself in that situation, I guess.” I see my tucked-away pajamas, my mother’s Halloween costume, and my stepmother’s ripped dress enveloped in her reflection. Three more women came forward with stories about Kavanaugh’s varying and seemingly lifelong inclination toward sexual misconduct. I watched, disturbed. The quiet part had been said out loud. It was bad, sure, but not unforgivable. He was sworn in and appointed as Supreme Court Justice anyway.
In the words of Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” And one only needs to look back to Anita Hill’s 1991 to find the canary’s verse.
She’d testified to the U.S. Senate against Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas. She accused him of gross sexual misconduct while he was her supervisor at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal EOC years prior. She was forced to recount humiliating details of his sexual misconduct for the entire nation’s sport. She also had four corroborating witnesses. Still, Hill, a Black woman, was grilled by the all-White, all-male Senate. Sen. Howell Heflin implied she was a “scorned woman” and asked if she had a “martyr complex” for civil rights, using her identity as a Black woman as a valid knock against her credibility. Sen. Arlen Specter dismissed the idea that speaking about women’s breast size to an employee was admonishable, and Sen. Patrick Leahy asked what she had to gain personally by coming forward. (She likely got the same participation medal all sexual harassment and assault victims get after testifying that she keeps in her study. Or maybe a jewelry box atop her dresser.)
The demonization and apathy toward women’s stories, whether in private or public spheres, is a calculated move in the patriarchal house of control. Trump, Thomas, and Kavanaugh are the political manifestation of a society that protects men from accountability while punishing women for speaking out. But, as I’d learned before, it isn’t just men who uphold this house.
In 2020, Trump tapped Amy Coney Barrett to fill another Supreme Court Justice role. She was a former handmaid for the People of Praise, a hierarchical Christian group founded by Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan. Men are superior, and women are submissive, dutiful, and purposeful for child-rearing and a bunch of other tired religious misogynistic shit. Amy Coney Barrett was so ingratiated with the group’s leadership that she lived with the Ranaghans while she attended law school in the 1990s.
When Barrett was sworn in, I mentally prepared myself for the collapse of Roe v. Wade. I could see a defector of the covenant right away. Like my stepmother and many other women, Barrett used the patriarchal blueprint to survive and excel within the House of Mirrors. She held hands on the other side of the one that held us down. She maintained a pillar of power by endorsing female inferiority. The canary was crying. She was noxious.
In 2020, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was brought to the Trump-stacked Supreme Court. The case challenged a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. In turn, Mississippi hit back, requesting the Supreme Court uphold the early ban and turn over Roe v. Wade completely. The conservative majority (6-3) Supreme Court sided with Mississippi, thereby adhering to the state’s request, effectively ending American women’s medical autonomy.
The messaging was in the walls of my room, carved into the nation's foundation. This house is not your home. My father, supposedly supportive of a woman’s right to choose, said not to worry. I live in a Blue state, he’d assured me. But what about the others? I asked, speaking aloud the oath, the covenant of protection for my fellow woman. What about them?
His answer was dismissive. “My father and I never talked politics.” I wondered aloud how often his body had been argued over the legislative chopping block. “I don’t want to argue with you.” Translation: Hush. Be polite. Be nice.
American men have become emboldened. They speak in destructive tongues, revealing their vampiric fangs as they do. Tucker Carlson gave a speech directed at the female Vice President of the United States at a closing rally for Trump’s 2024 campaign. He referred to Trump as the “father” of the nation, as though we live in his house, a tyrannical ruler, a strong man. He said: “There has to be a point at which Dad comes home… and you know what he says?... You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you…It’s going to hurt you a lot more… And you earned this.”
Carlson’s language was not merely political rhetoric. It was implied violence meant to tell a woman in power, “You are not equal to me. Your attempt at power is punishable.” It hit at the root of how men from the highest posts to the ones who tucked us in for bed dismiss, ignore, and justify harm for existing as women aloud. The more space we make for women to embody power, the more men stop pretending to be nice. America is normalizing authoritarian and misogynistic rhetoric and policies as the formerly quiet fight is pushed to the main stage. These men don’t want us alongside them. They use tools like demeaning language, like sexual coercion and dismissal, as a means to reinstate their dominance within their cushy patriarchal status quo.
This culture doesn’t just harm women; it stunts men, too. It locks them into roles that dehumanize others and alienate their connection to our shared humanity. Challenging it comes at a cost that even the most empathetic men are unwilling to pay. It’s easier to laugh it off, dismiss it, or swear neutrality while benefiting from a system rigged in their favor. To proactively empathize with the wounded draftees of patriarchal control would be to challenge male supremacy inconveniently. Acknowledging the norm is tiresome, requiring, and uncomfortable. The wrong trick of the light in the House of Mirrors, and they may see where they’d inadvertently cosigned female inferiority as a dogma. It is an assault on their self-concept to reckon that they may have played some version of a vampire in someone else’s story. More importantly, it is an attack on their power to work against it. There is an agreement in place ─ their (progressively less) silent oath, where chauvinism is the language to laugh along to. Imperfect, but not unjustifiable. Concurrently, young girls and women continue to learn the silent language of safety inside the covenant of womanhood, ingesting society’s instructions to be quiet to avert our eyes.
Women who betray the covenant think aligning and cosigning with the perpetrator manifests their power. Women like my stepmom, like Barrett, and the roughly 45-55% of women who voted for Trump think within the perilous House that these men won’t see the reflective value of only a woman shining back. They help reopen the doors to what we all know to be dangerous. Winston Churchill once said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.” To those women, the appeasers, I ask, who will speak for you once you’ve helped quell our voices into silence? Whose hand will you grab and lead to the backyard to admit your likeness in quiet shame?

After Trump was re-elected, we, the covenant, held hands and said, “Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel better.” We resign ourselves to dance between liberation and appeasement, between standing our ground and smoothing the social edges of discomfort to avoid contention. In this House of Mirrors, every woman learns to become her own protector, her own witness, her own unforgiving judge. We justify our harm. We carry deep wounds and secret vile truths about men—the neighbor, the teacher, the judge— others call ‘nice.’
But I think feeling quasi-better in the face of disrespect, the erosion of our rights, minds, and bodies, isn’t the anecdote, the same way silence isn’t either. The crocodile lurking forward in oppression is terrifying and very real. The future depends on us.
Skirting around rotten behavior only aids in abetting its power to grow larger. I’ve seen this firsthand as a child, where my silence was received as a virtue. My compliance became my shield, my survival instinct. But it suffocated me, crippled me, and made me easier prey for the next predator. The cycle is perpetuated in hush. It is an inherited noose under the guise of “peace” passed on generationally from one silent woman to the next. It makes us complicit with the framework.
To stop singing canary death tunes, we need to start screaming.
Those who benefit from our oppression need premium seats to our gruesome, shitty stories. Let them feel the weight of what we carry, day in and day out, as we navigate a world built to keep us accommodating to strange monsters dressed like men. Do not excuse sexually violent language, the erosion of medical autonomy, or the ‘nice’ men who laugh along to it. We need to eradicate the notion of a neutral ground.
When Trump was re-elected, I felt the weight of every silent “Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel better.” We must ask ourselves whose house we live in and why we bow to the notion of women’s safety as something negotiable. We must take accountability, not for the acts against us, but for the true ‘silent majority,’ the sisterhood of disgrace, where newcomers inherit their shame alone. They don’t exist in a vacuum, far from it. Girls and women take on abuses like a birthright. Painfully, we braid the multi-generational noose of silence for the next girl to strangle her voice with.
We must sing not as a dying canary but as something more free.
As when I tucked away my favorite blue satin pajamas, which once symbolized my comfort (but morphed into a symbol of my powerlessness), hoping the vampire’s bite would neatly heal, I’ve been tempted to tuck away the American flag out of sight. I’m tempted to turn away from the droplets of blood soaking through it. But I know I cannot. I must testify like the brave Anita Hill and the bold Christine Blasey Ford for the rest of us. I must face the contradictions of my safety and my freedom. I must demand my house is more than that ─ a home. I hold the line in my allegiance to the covenant, using my light to keep out the night.
I will no longer be nice. I will be good. I will be brave, instead.